The trouble with referendums is that they feed the illusion that politics is all about binary choices that lead to fixed political destinations. Yet one of the reasons we have a Parliament is that political decision-taking is to a very large extent a never-ending negotiation, where the goal posts are in constant motion. ('The People' too, is ever in flux.)
It is perhaps also worth reminding ourselves of the obsevation made by Prof. Niall Ferguson that ‘The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history’ and plebiscites, along with assorted other mechanisms for sudden, drastic historical changes of direction, are very much an open invitation to unintended consequences.
Brexit was presented as one of those issues that could be farmed out to ‘The People’ for a simple YES/NO answer, but if we have learned anything since 2016 it was that this was deeply misguided.
A second stab at this would suffer from many of the same fundamental flaws. I find myself, like many MPs perhaps, torn between what I would want to see happen now (viz that petition) and what is actually in the national interest.
In the Sunday Times today Gisela Stewart, former Chair of the Leave campaign, argues that it’s a myth that ‘the people’ made their decision in an uninformed manner.
For me, this particular issue is fairly irrelevant. Even if every one of the 17m+ who voted to leave had a comprehensive grasp of the options and issues behind that decision, can one really say anybody had a proper sense of their own and the nation’s stake in the matter? This has only - and could only - become manifest in the intervening period, and then in a not entirely transparent manner.
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